NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, designed to give the Earth an unprecedented view of the first stages of the Earth, landed at its gravitational pull in orbit around the sun on Monday, about one million miles from Earth.
With the final repair game made by rocket-propelled grenade launchers, Webb reached its destination at the landmark between Earth and the sun known as Lagrange Point Two, or L2, and arrived one month after its launch, the space station said.
the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, and the lower team used radio signals to ensure that Webb was successfully “inserted” into the orbital loop around L2.
From its prominent position in space, Webb will follow a special “halo” system in constant harmony with the Earth, as the planet and the telescope rotate in the sun in harmony, resulting in uninterrupted radio communications.
By comparison, Webb’s 30-year-old predecessor, the Hubble Space Telescope, orbits the Earth from 547 kilometers, entering and leaving the planet’s shadow every 90 minutes.
The solar system’s orbit at L2 will hold the telescope firmly in place and therefore take a little extra effort to keep Webb from moving, Eric Smith, a NASA program scientist for Webb, told Reuters in an interview last week.
The mechanical engineering center has begun to refine the main telescope – a series of 18 hexagonal segments of 21-foot gold-plated beryllium metal, 4 inches (6.5 m) horizontally – much larger than the Hubble’s large mirror.
Its size and its highly functional design in the infrared spectrum will allow Webb to look at clouds of gas and dust and look at objects farther away, thus later, than Hubble or any other telescope.